Apropos it's all very well, this instruction of Alsana's to look at the thing close up; to look at it dead-straight between the eyes; an unflinching and honest stare, a meticulous inspection that would go beyond the heart of the matter to its marrow, beyond the marrow to the root but the question is how far back do you want? How far will do? The old American question: what do you want blood?

　　Most probably more than blood is required: whispered asides; lost conversations; medals and photographs; lists and certificates, yellowing paper bearing the faint imprint of brown dates. Back, back, back. Well, all right, then. Back to Archie spit-clean, pink-faced and polished, looking just old enough at seventeen to fool the men from the medical board with their pencils and their measuring tape. Back to Samad, two years older and the warm colour of baked bread. Back to the day when they were first assigned to each other, Samad Miah Iqbal (row 2, Over here now, soldier!) and Alfred Archibald Jones (Move it, move it, move it), the day Archie involuntarily forgot that most fundamental principle of English manners. He stared. They were standing side by side on a stretch of black dirt-track Russian ground, dressed identically in little triangular caps perched on their heads like paper sailing-boats, wearing the same itchy standard uniform, their ice-pinched toes resting in the same black boots scattered with the same dust. But Archie couldn't help but stare. And Samad put up with it, waited and waited for it to pass, until after a week of being cramped in their tank, hot and suffocated by the airless machine and subjected to Archie's relentless gaze, he had putted-up-with as much as his hot-head ever could put up with anything.

　　"You what?" said Archie, flustered, for he was not one to have private conversations on army time. "Nobody, I mean, nothing I mean, well, what do you mean?"They both spoke under their breath, for the conversation was not private in the other sense, there being two other privates and a captain in their five-man Churchill rolling through Athens on its way to Thessaloniki. It was i April 1945. Archie Jones was the driver of the tank, Samad was thewireless operator, Roy Mackintosh was the co-driver, Will Johnson was crunched on a bin as the gunner, and Thomas Dickinson-Smith was sitting on the slightly elevated chair, which, even though it squashed his head against the ceiling, his newly granted captaincy would not permit his pride to relinquish. None of them had seen anyone else but each other for three weeks.

　　"I mean merely that it is likely we have another two years stuck in this thing."A voice crackled through the wireless, and Samad, not wishing to be seen neglecting his duties, answered it speedily and efficiently.

　　"And?" asked Archie, after Samad had given their coordinates.

　　"And there is only so much of that eyeballing that a man can countenance. Is it that you are doing some research into wireless operators or are you just in a passion over my arse?"Their captain, Dickinson-Smith, who was in a passion over Samad's arse (but not only that; also his mind; also two slender muscular arms that could only make sense wrapped around a lover; also those luscious light green brown eyes) silenced the conversation immediately.

　　"Ick-Ball! Jones! Get on with it. Do you see anyone else here chewing the fat?""I was just making an objection, sir. It is hard, sir, for a man to concentrate on his Foxtrot F's and his Zebra Z's and then his assume such eyes belonged to a man filled with '

　　"Shut it, Sultan, you poof said Roy, who hated Samad and his ponceyradiooperator-ways.

　　"Mackintosh," said Dickinson-Smith, 'come now, let's not stop the Sultan. Continue, Sultan."To avoid the possible suggestion that he was partial to Samad, Captain Dickinson-Smith made a practice of picking on him and encouraging his hateful Sultan nickname, but he never did it in the right way; it was always too soft, too similar to Samad's own luxurious language and only resulted in Roy and the other eighty Roys under his direct command hating Dickinson-Smith, ridiculing him, openly displaying their disrespect; by April 1945 they were utterly filled with contempt for him and sickened by his poncey-commander-queer-boy-ways. Archie, new to the First Assault Regiment R. E." was just learning this.

　　"I just told him to shut it, and he'll shut it if he knows what's good for him, the Indian Sultan bastard. No disrespect to you, sir, 'course," added Roy, as a polite gesture.

　　Dickinson-Smith knew in other regiments, in other tanks, it simply was not the case that people spoke back to their superiors or even spoke at all. Even Roy's Polite Gesture was a sign of Dickinson-Smith's failure. In those other tanks, in the Shermans, Churchills and Matildas dotted over the waste of Europe like resilient cockroaches, there was no question of respect or disrespect.

　　Only Obey, Disobey, Punish.

　　"Sultan .. . Sultan.. ." Samad mused. "Do you know, I wouldn't mind the epithet, Mr. Mackintosh, if it were at least accurate. It's not historically accurate, you know. It is not, even geographically speaking, accurate. I am sure I have explained to you that I am from Bengal. The word "Sultan" refers to certain men of the Arab lands many hundreds of miles west of Bengal. To call me Sultan is about as accurate, in terms of the mileage, you understand, as if I referred to you as a Jerry-Hun fat bastard.""I called you Sultan and I'm calling you it again, all right?""Oh, Mr. Mackintosh. Is it so complex, is it so impossible, that you and I, stuck in this British machine, could find it in ourselves to fight together as British subjects?"Will Johnson, who was a bit simple, took off his cap as he always did when someone said "British'.

　　"What's the poof on about?" asked Mackintosh, adjusting his beer-gut.

　　"Nothing," said Samad. "I'm afraid I was not "on" about anything; I was just talking, talking, just trying the shooting of the breeze as they say, and trying to get Sapper Jones here to stop his staring business, his goggly eyes, just this and only this .. . and I have failed on both counts, it seems."He seemed genuinely wounded, and Archie felt the sudden un soldier-like desire to remove pain.

　　But it was not the place and not the time.

　　"All right. Enough, all of you. Jones, check the map," said Dickinson-Smith.

　　Archie checked the map.

　　Their journey was a long tiresome one, rarely punctuated by any action. Archie's tank was a bridge-builder, one of the specialist divisions not tied to English county allegiances or to a type of weaponry, but providing service across the army and from country to country, recovering damaged equipment, laying bridges, creating passages for battle, creating routes where routes had been destroyed. Their job was not so much to fight the war as to make sure it ran smoothly. By the time Archie joined the conflict, it was clear that the cruel, bloody decisions would be made by air, not in the 3o-centimetre difference between the width of a German armour piercing shell and an English one. The real war, the one where cities were brought to their knees, the war with the deathly calculations of size, detonation,The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal population, went on many miles above Archie's head. Meanwhile, on the ground, their heavy, armour-plated scout-tank had a simpler task: to avoid the civil war in the mountains a war within a war between the EARN and the EL AS; to pick their way through the glazed eyes of dead statistics and the 'wasted youth'; to make sure the roads of communication stretching from one end of hell to the other were fully communicable.

　　"The bombed ammunition factory is twenty miles southwest, sir. We are to collect what we can, sir. Private Ick-Ball has passed to me at 16.47 hours a radio message that informs me that the area, as far as can be seen from the air, sir, is unoccupied, sir," said Archie.

　　"This is not war," Samad had said quietly.

　　Two weeks later, as Archie checked their route to Sofia, to no one in particular Samad said, "I should not be here."As usual he was ignored; most fiercely and resolutely by Archie, who wanted somehow to listen.

　　"I mean, I am educated. I am trained. I should be soaring with the Royal Airborne Force, shelling from on high! I am an officer! Not some mullah, some sepoy, wearing out my chap pals in hard service. My great-grandfather Mangal Pande' he looked around for the recognition the name deserved but, being met only with blank pancake English faces, he continued 'was the great hero of the Indian Mutiny!"Silence.

　　"Of 1857! It was he who shot the first hateful pig fat-smeared bullet and sent it spinning off into oblivion!"A longer, denser silence.

　　"If it wasn't for this buggery hand' - Samad, inwardly cursing the English goldfish-memory for history, lifted five dead, tightly curled fingers from their usual resting place on his chest 'this shitty hand that the useless Indian army gave me for my troubles, I would have matched his achievements.

　　And why am I crippled? Because the Indian army knows more about the kissing of arses than it does about the heat and sweat of battle! Never go to India, Sapper Jones, my dear friend, it is a place for fools and worse than fools. Fools, Hindus, Sikhs and Punjabis. And now there is all this murmuring about independence give Bengal independence, Archie, is what I say leave India in bed with the British, if that's what she likes."His arm crashed to his side with the dead weight and rested itself like an old man after an angry fit. Samad always addressed Archie as if they were in league together against the rest of the tank.

　　No matter how much Archie shunned him, those four days of eyeballing had created a kind of silk-thread bond between the two men that Samad tugged whenever he got the opportunity.

　　"You see, Jones," said Samad, 'the real mistake the viceroy made was to give the Sikhs any position of power, you see? Just because they have some limited success with the kaffir in Africa, he says Yes, Mr. Man, with your sweaty fat face and your silly fake English moustache and your pagri balanced like a large shit on the top of your head, you can be an officer, we will Indianize the army; go, go and fight in Italy, Rissaldar Major Pugri, Daffadar Pugri, with my grand old English troops! Mistake! And then they take me, hero of the 9th North Bengal Mounted Rifles, hero of the Bengal flying corps, and say, "Samad Miah Iqbal, Samad, we are going to confer on you a great honour. You will fight in mainland Europe not starve and drink your own piss in Egypt or Malaya, no you will fight the Hun where you find him." On his very doorstep, Sapper Jones, on his very doorstep. So! I went. Italy, I thought, well, this is where I will show the English army that the Muslim men of Bengal can fight like any Sikh. Better! Stronger! And are the best educated and are those with the good blood, we who are truly of Officer Material.""Indian officers? That'll be the bloody day," said Roy.

　　"On my first day there," continued Samad, "I destroyed a Nazi hide-out from the air. Like a swooping eagle.""Bollocks," said Roy.

　　"On my second day, I shot from the air the enemy as he approached the Gothic Line, breaking the Argenta Gap and pushing the Allies through to the Po Valley. Lord Mounthatten himself was to have congratulated me himself in his own person. He would have shaken this hand. But this was all prevented. Do you know what occurred on my third day, Sapper Jones? Do you know how I was crippled? A young man in his prime?""No," said Archie quietly.

　　"A bastard Sikh, Sapper Jones, a bastard fool. As we stood in a trench, his gun went off and shot me through the wrist. But I wouldn't have it amputated. Every bit of my body comes from Allah.

　　Every bit will return to him."So Samad had ended up in the un feted bridge-laying division of His Majesty's Army with the rest of the losers; with men like Archie, with men like Dickinson-Smith (whose government file included the phrase "Risk: Homosexual'), with frontal lobotomy cases like Mackintosh and Johnson.

　　The rejects of war. As Roy affectionately called it: the Buggered Battalion. Much of the problem with the outfit lay with the captain of the First Assault Regiment: Dickinson-Smith was no soldier.

　　And certainly no commander, though commanding was in his genes. Against his will he had been dragged out of his father's college, shaken free of his father's gown, and made to Fight A War, as his father had. And his father before him, and his father before him, ad infinitum. Young Thomas had resigned himself to his fate and was engaged in a concerted and prolonged effort (four years now) to get his name on the ever extending list of Dickinson-Smiths carved on a long slab of death-stone in the village of Little Marlow, to be buried on top of them all in the family's sardine-can tomb that proudly dominated the historic churchyard.

　　Killed by the Hun, the Wogs, the Chinks, the Kaffirs, the Frogs, the Scots, the Spies, the Zulus, the Indians (South, East and Red), and accidentally mistaken for a darting okapi by a Swede on a big-game hunt in Nairobi, traditionally the Dickinson Smiths were insatiable in their desire to see Dickinson-Smith blood spilled on foreign soil. And on the occasions when there wasn't a war the Dickinson-Smiths busied themselves with the Irish Situation, a kind of Dickinson-Smith holiday resort of death, which had been going since 1600 and showed no sign of letting up. But dying's no easy trick. And though the chance to hurl themselves in front of any sort of lethal weaponry had held a magnetic attraction for the family throughout the ages, this Dickinson-Smith couldn't seem to manage it. Poor Thomas had a different kind of lust for exotic ground. He wanted to know it, to nurture it, to learn from it, to love it. He was a simple non-starter at the war game.

　　The long story of how Samad went from the pinnacle of military achievement in the Bengal corps to the Buggered Battalion was told and retold to Archie, in different versions and with elaborations upon it, once a day for another two weeks, whether he listened or not. Tedious as it was, it was a highlight next to the other tales of failure that filled those long nights, and kept the men of the Buggered Battalion in their preferred state of de motivation and despair. Amongst the well-worn canon was the Tragic Death of Roy's Fiancee, a hairdresser who slipped on a set of rollers and broke her neck on the sink; Archie's Failure to Go to Grammar School because his mother couldn't afford to buy the uniform; Dickinson-Smith's many murdered relatives; as for Will Johnson, he did not speak in the day but whimpered as he slept, and his face spoke eloquently of more miserable miseries than anyone dare inquire into. The Buggered Battalion continued like this for some time, a travelling circus of discontents roaming aimlessly through Eastern Europe; freaks and fools with no audience but each other. Who performed and stared in turns. Until finally the tank rolled into a day that History has not remembered. That Memory has made no effort to retain. A sudden stone submerged. False teeth floating silently to the bottom of a glass. 6 May 1945.

　　At about 18.00 hours on the 6th of May 1945 something in the tank blew up. It wasn't a bomb noise but an engineering disaster noise, and the tank slowly ground to a halt. They were in a tiny Bulgarian village bordering Greece and Turkey, which the war had got bored with and left, returning the people to almost normal routine.

　　"Right," said Roy, having had a look at the problem. "The engine's buggered and one of the tracks has broken. We're gonna have to radio for help, and then sit tight till it arrives. Nothing we can do.""We're going to make no effort at all to repair it?" asked Samad.

　　"No," said Dickinson-Smith. "Private Mackintosh is right. There's no way we could deal with this kind of damage with the equipment we have at hand. We'll just have to wait here until help arrives.""How long will this be?""A day," piped up Johnson. "We're way off from the rest.""Are we required, Captain Smith, to remain in the vehicle for these twenty-four hours?" asked Samad, who despaired of Roy's personal hygiene and was loath to spend a stationary, sultry evening with him.

　　"Bloody right we are what d'ya think this is, a day off?" growled Roy.

　　"No, no ... I don't see why you shouldn't wander a bit there's no point in us all being holed up here. You and Jones go, report back, and then Privates Mackintosh, Johnson and I will go when you come back."So Samad and Archie went into the village and spent three hours drinking Sambucca and listening to the cafe owner tell of the miniature invasion of two Nazis who turned up in the town, ate all his supplies, had sex with two loose village girls and shot a man in the head for failing to give them directions to the next town swiftly enough.

　　"In everything they were impatient," said the old man, shaking his head. Samad settled the bill.

　　Walking back, Archie said, "Cor, they don't need many of'em to conquer and pillage," in an attempt to make conversation.

　　"One strong man and one weak is a colony, Sapper Jones," said Samad.

　　When Archie and Samad reached the tank, they found Privates Mackintosh and Johnson and Captain Thomas Dickinson-Smith dead. Johnson strangled with cheese wire, Roy shot in the back.

　　Roy's jaw had been forced open, his silver fillings removed; a pair of pliers now sat in his mouth like an iron tongue. It appeared that Thomas Dickinson-Smith had, as his attacker moved towards him, turned from his allotted fate and shot himself in the face. The only Dickinson-Smith to die by English hands.

　　While Archie and Samad assessed this situation as best they could, Colonel-General Jodl sat in a small red schoolhouse in Reims and shook his fountain pen. Once. Twice. Then led the ink a solemn dance along the dotted line and wrote history in his name. The end of war in Europe. As the paper was whisked away by a man at his shoulder, Jodl hung his head, struck by the full realization of the deed. But it would be a full two weeks before either Archie or Samad were to hear about it.

　　These were strange times, strange enough for an Iqbal and a Jones to strike up a friendship.

　　That day, while the rest of Europe celebrated, Samad and Archie stood on a Bulgarian roadside, Samad clutching a handful of wires, chip board and metal casing in his good fist.

　　"This radio is stripped to buggery," said Samad. "We'll need to begin from the beginning. This is a very bad business, Jones. Very bad. We have lost our means of communication, transport and defence. Worst: we have lost our command. A man of war without a commander is a very bad business indeed."Archie turned from Samad and threw up violently in a bush. Private Mackintosh, for all his big talk, had shat himself at St. Peter's Gate, and the smell had forced itself into Archie's lungs and dragged up his nerves, his fear and his breakfast.

　　As far as fixing the radio went, Samad knew how, he knew the theory, but Archie had the hands, and a certain knack when it came to wires and nails and glue. And it was a funny kind of struggle between knowledge and practical ability which went on between them as they pieced together the tiny metal strips that might save them both.

　　"Pass me the three-ohm resistor, will you?"Archie went very red, unsure which item Samad was referring to. His hand wavered across the box of wires and bits and bobs. Samad discreetly coughed as Archie's little finger strayed towards the correct item. It was awkward, an Indian telling an Englishman what to do but somehow the quietness of it, the manliness of it, got them over it. It was during this time that Archie learnt the true power of do-it-yourself, how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives, how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with him all his life.

　　"Good man," said Samad, as Archie passed him the electrode, but then, finding one hand not enough to manipulate the wires or to pin them to the radio board, he passed the item back to Archie and signalled where it was to be put.

　　"We'll get this done in no time," said Archie cheerfully.

　　"Bubblegum! Please, mister!"By the fourth day, a gang of village children had begun to gather round the tank, attracted by the grisly murders, Samad's green-eyed glamour, and Archie's American bubblegum.

　　"Mr. Soldier," said one chestnut-hued sparrow-weight boy in careful English, 'bubblegum please thank you Archie reached into his pocket and pulled out five thin pink strips. The boy distributed them snootily amongst his friends. They began chewing wildly, eyes bursting from their heads with the effort. Then, as the flavour subsided, they stood in silent, awed contemplation of their benefactor.

　　After a few minutes the same scrawny boy was sent up as the People's Representative once more.

　　"Mr. Soldier." He held out his hand. "Bubblegum please thank you "No more," said Archie, going through an elaborate sign language. "I've got no more.""Please, thank you Please?" repeated the boy urgently.

　　"Oh, for God's sake," snapped Samad. "We have to fix the radio and get this thing moving. Let's get on with it, OK?""Bubblegum, mister, Mr. Soldier, bubblegum." It became a chant, almost; the children mixing up the few words they had learnt, placing them in any order.

　　"Please?" The boy stretched out his arm in such a strenuous manner that it pushed him on to the very tips of his toes.

　　Suddenly he opened his palm, and then smiled coquettishly, preparing to bargain. There in his open fist four green notes were screwed into a bundle like a handful of grass.

　　"Dollars, mister!""Where did you get this?" asked Samad, making a snatch for it. The boy seized back his hand.

　　He moved constantly from one foot to another the impish dance that children learn from war. The simplest version of being on your guard.

　　"First bubblegum, mister.""Tell me where you got this. I warn you not to play the fool with me."Samad made a grab for the boy and caught him by the arm of his shirt. He tried desperately to wriggle free. The boy's friendsbegan to slink off, deserting their quickly sinking champion.

　　"Did you kill a man for this?"A vein in Samad's forehead was fighting passionately to escape his skin. He wished to defend a country that wasn't his and revenge the killing of men who would not have acknowledged him in a civilian street. Archie was amazed. It was his country; in his small, cold-blooded, average way he was one of the many essential vertebrae in its backbone, yet he could feel nothing comparable for it.

　　"No, mister, no, no. From him. Him."He stretched his free arm and pointed to a large derelict house that sat like a fat brooding hen on the horizon.

　　"Did someone in that house kill our men?" barked Samad.

　　"What you say, mister?" squeaked the boy.

　　"Who is there?""He is doctor. He is there. But sick. Can't move. Dr. Sick."A few remaining children excitedly confirmed the name. Dr. Sick, mister, Dr. Sick.

　　"What's wrong with him?"The boy, now enjoying the attention, theatrically mimed a man crying.

　　"English? Like us? German? French? Bulgarian? Greek?" Samad released the boy, tired from the misplaced energy.

　　"He no one. He Dr. Sick, only," said the boy dismissively. "Bubblegum?"A few days later and still no help had arrived. The strain of having to be continually at war in such a pleasant village began to pull at Archie and Samad, and bit by bit they relaxed more and more into a kind of civilian life. Every evening they ate dinner in the old man Gozan's kitchen-cafe.

　　Watery soup cost five cigarettes each. Any kind offish cost a low-ranking bronze medal. As Archie was now wearing one of Dickinson-Smith's uniforms, his own having fallen apart, he had a few of the dead man's medals to spare and with them purchased other niceties and necessities: coffee, soap, chocolate. For some pork Archie handed over a fag-card of Dorothy Lamour that had been pressed against his arse in his back pocket ever since he joined up.

　　"Go on, Sam we'll use them as tokens, like food stamps; we can buy them back when we have the means, if you like.""I'm a Muslim," said Samad, pushing a plate of pork away. "And my Rita Hayworth leaves me only with my own soul.""Why don't you eat it?" said Archie, guzzling his two chops down like a madman. "Strange business, if you ask me.""I don't eat it for the same reason you as an Englishman will never truly satisfy a woman.""Why's that?" said Archie, pausing from his feast.

　　"It's in our cultures, my friend." He thought for a minute. "Maybe deeper. Maybe in our bones."After dinner, they would make a pretence of scouring the village for the killers, rushing through the town, searching the same three disreputable bars and looking in the back bedrooms of pretty women's houses, but after a time this too was abandoned and they sat instead smoking cheap cigars outside the tank, enjoying the lingering crimson sunsets and chatting about their previous incarnations as newspaper boy (Archie) and biology student (Samad). They knocked around ideas that Archie did not entirely understand, and Samad offered secrets into the cool night that he had never spoken out loud. Long, comfortable silences passed between them like those between women who have known each other for years. They looked out on to stars that lit up unknown country, but neither man clung particularly to home. In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and colour, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.

　　The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah la bal A week and a half since the radio had been repaired and there was still no reply to the aid signals they sent bouncing along the airwaves in search of ears to hear them. (By now, the village knew the war was over, but they felt disinclined to reveal the fact to their two visitors, whose daily bartering had proved such a boost to the local economy.) In the stretches of empty time Archie would lever up sections of the wheel track with an iron pole, while Samad investigated the problem.

　　Across continents, both men's families presumed them dead.

　　"Is there a woman that you have back in Brighton City?" asked Samad, anchoring his head between the lion jaws of track and tank.

　　Archie was not a good-looking boy. He was dashing if you took a photo and put your thumb over his nose and mouth, but otherwise he was quite unremarkable. Girls would be attracted to his large, sad Sinatra blue eyes, but then be put off by the Bing Crosby ears and the nose that ended in a natural onion-bulb swelling like W. C. Fields's.

　　"A few," he said nonchalantly. "You know, here and there. You?""A young lady has already been picked out for me. A Miss Begum daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Begum. The "in-laws", as you say. Dear God, those two are so far up the rectums of the establishment in Bengal that even the Lord Governor sits snivelling waiting for his mullah to come in carrying a dinner invitation from them!"Samad laughed loudly and waited for company, but Archie, not understanding a word, stayed poker-faced as usual.

　　"Oh, they are the best people," continued Samad, only slightly dispirited. "The very best people.

　　Extremely good blood .. . and as an added bonus, there is a propensity amongst their womentraditionally, throughout the ages, you understand for really enormous melons."Samad performed the necessary mime, and then returned his attention to realigning each tooth of track with its appropriate groove.

　　"And?" asked Archie.

　　"And what?""Are they .. . ?" Archie repeated the mime, but this time with the kind of anatomical exaggeration that leaves air-traced women unable to stand upright.

　　"Oh, but I have still some time to wait," he said, smiling wistfully. "Unfortunately, the Begum family do not yet have a female child of my generation.""You mean your wife's not bloody born yet?""What of it?" asked Samad, pulling a cigarette from Archie's top pocket. He scratched a match along the side of the tank and lit it. Archie wiped the sweat off his face with a greasy hand.

　　"Where I come from," said Archie, 'a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her.""Where you come from it is customary to boil vegetables until they fall apart. This does not mean," said Samad tersely, 'that it is a good idea."Their final evening in the village was absolutely dark, silent. The muggy air made it unpleasant to smoke, so Archie and Samad tapped their fingers on the cold stone steps of a church, for lack of other hand-employment. For a moment, in the twilight, Archie forgot the war that had actually ceased to exist anyway. A past tense, future perfect kind of night.

　　It was while they were still innocent of peace, during this last night of ignorance, that Samad decided to cement his friendship with Archie. Often this is done by passing on a singular piece of information: some sexual peccadillo, some emotional secret or obscure hidden passion that the reticence of new acquaintance has prevented being spoken. But for Samad, nothing was closer or meant more to him than his blood. It was natural, then, as they sat on holy ground, that he should speak of what was holy to him. And there was no stronger evocation of the blood that ran through him, and the ground which that blood had stained over the centuries, than the story of his great-grandfather. So Samad told Archie the much neglected, loo-year-old, mildewed yarn of Mangal Pande.

　　"So, he was your grandfather?" said Archie, after the tale had been told, the moon had passed behind clouds, and he had been suitably impressed. "Your real, blood grandfather?""Great-grandfather.""Well, that is something. Do you know: I remember it from school -I do- History of the Colonies, Mr. Juggs. Bald, bug-eyed, nasty old duffer Mr. Juggs, I mean, not your grandfather. Got the message through, though, even if it took a ruler to the back of your hand.. . You know, you still hear people in the regiments calling each other Pandies, you know, if the bloke's a bit of a rebel... I never thought where it came from .. . Pande was the rebel, didn't like the English, shot the first bullet of the Mutiny. I remember it now, clear as a bell. And that was your grandfather!""Great-grandfather.""Well, well. That's something, isn't it?" said Archie, placing his hands behind his head and lying back to look at the stars. "To have a bit of history in your blood like that. Motivates you, I'd imagine. I'm a Jones, you see. "Slike a "Smith". We're nobody . My father used to say: "We're the chaff, boy, we're the chaff." Not that I've ever been much bothered, mind. Proud all the same, you know. Good honest English stock. But in your family you had a hero!"Samad puffed up with pride. "Yes, Archibald, that is exactly the word. Naturally, you will get these petty English academics trying to discredit him, because they cannot bear to give an Indian his due. But he was a hero and every act I have undertaken in this war has been in the shadow of his example."That's true, you know," said Archie thoughtfully. "They don't speak well about Indians back home; they certainly wouldn't like it if you said an Indian was a hero .. . everybody would look at you a bit funny."Suddenly Samad grabbed his hand. It was hot, almost fevered, Archie thought. He'd never had another man grab his hand; his first instinct was to move or punch him or something, but then he reconsidered because Indians were emotional, weren't they? All that spicy food and that.

　　"Please. Do me this one, great favour, Jones. If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home if you, if we, get back to our respective homes if ever you hear anyone speak of the East," and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, 'hold your judgement. If you are told "they are all this" or "they do this" or "their opinions are these", withhold your judgement until all the facts are upon you. Because that land they call "India" goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same amongst that multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight."Samad released his hand and rummaged in his pocket, dabbing his finger into a repository of white dust he kept in there, slipping it discreetly into his mouth. He leant against the wall and drew his fingertips along the stone. It was a tiny missionary church, converted into a hospital and then abandoned after two months when the sound of shells began to shake the windowsills. Samad and Archie had taken to sleeping there because of the thin mattresses and the large airy windows.

　　Samad had taken an interest too (due to loneliness, he told himself; due to melancholy) in the powdered morphine to be found in stray storage cabinets throughout the building; hidden eggs on an addictive Easter trail. Whenever Archie went to piss or to try the radio once more, Samad roved up and down his little church, looting cabinet after cabinet, like a sinner moving from confessional to confessional. Then, having found his little bottle of sin, he would take the opportunity to rub a little into his gums or smoke a little in his pipe, and then lay back on the cool terra cotta floor, looking up into the exquisite curve of the church dome. It was covered in words, this church. Words left three hundred years earlier by dissenters, unwilling to pay a burial tax during a cholera epidemic, locked in the church by a corrupt landlord and left to die in there but not before they covered every wall with letters to family, poems, statements of eternal disobedience. Samad liked the story well enough when he first heard it, but it only truly struck him when the morphine hit. Then every nerve in his body would be alive, and the information, all the information contained in the universe, all the information on walls, would pop its cork and flow through him like electricity through a ground wire. Then his head would open out like a deck chair And he would sit in it a while and watch his world go by. Tonight, after just more than enough, Samad felt particularly lucid. Like his tongue was buttered and like the world was a polished marble egg. And he felt a kinship with the dead dissenters, they were Pande's brothers every rebel, it seemed to Samad tonight, was his brother he wished he could speak with them about the mark they made on the world. Had it been enough? When death came, was it really enough? Were they satisfied with the thousand words they left behind?

　　Till tell you something for nothing," said Archie, following Samad's eyes and catching the church dome's reflection in them. "If I'd only had a few hours left, I wouldn't have spent it painting pictures on the ceiling.""Tell me," inquired Samad, irritated to have been dragged from his pleasant contemplation, 'what great challenge would you undertake in the hours before your death? Unravel Fermat's Theorem, perhaps? Master Aristotelian philosophy?""What? Who? No ... I'd you know .. . make love to a lady," said Archie, whose inexperience made him prudish. "You know for the last time."Samad broke into a laugh. "For the first time, is more likely.""Oh, go on, I'm serious.""All right. And if there were no "ladies" in the vicinity?""Well, you can always," and here Archie went a pillar-box red, this being his own version of cementing a friendship, 'slap the salami, as the GIs say!""Slap," repeated Samad contemptuously, 'the salami .. . and that is it, is it? The last thing you would wish to do before you shuffled off this mortal coil is "slap your salami". Achieve orgasm."Archie, who came from Brighton, where nobody ever, ever said words like orgasm, began to convulse with hysterical embarrassment.

　　"Who is funny? Something is funny?" asked Samad, lighting a fag distractedly despite the heat, his mind carried elsewhere by the morphine.

　　"Nobody," began Archie haltingly, 'nothing.""Can't you see it, Jones? Can't you see .. ." Samad lay half in, half out of the doorway, his arms stretched up to the ceiling, '.. . the intention? They weren't slapping their salamis spreading the white stuff- they were looking for something a little more permanent.""I can't see the difference, frankly," said Archie. "When you're dead, you're dead.""Oh no, Archibald, no," whispered Samad, melancholic. "You don't believe that. You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence, Archibald," he said, gesturing to the church walls. "They knew it. My great-grandfather knew it.

　　Some day our children will know it.""Our children!" sniggered Archie, simply amused. The possibility of offspring seemed so distant.

　　"Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend.

　　The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samoa1 Miah Iqbal When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes.""Do you know," said Archie, after a pause, just before I left from Felixstowe I saw this new drill they have now which breaks in two and you can put different things on the end spanner, hammer, even a bottle-opener. Very useful in a tight spot, I'd imagine. I tell you, I'd bloody love one of those."Samad looked at Archie for a moment and then shook his head. "Come on, let's get inside. This Bulgarian food. Turns my stomach over. I need a bit of sleep.""You look pale," said Archie, helping him up.

　　"It's for my sins, Jones, for my sins and yet I am more sinned against than sinning." Samad giggled to himself.

　　"You what?"Archie bore the weight of Samad on one side as they walked inside.

　　"I have eaten something," said Samad, putting on a cut-glass English accent, 'that is about to disagree with me."Archie knew very well that Samad sneaked morphine from the cabinets, but he could see Samad wanted him not to know, so "Let's get you into bed," was all he said, bringing Samad over to a mattress.

　　"When this is over, we will meet again in England, OK?" said Samad, lunging towards his mattress.

　　"Yes," said Archie, trying to imagine walking along Brighton pier with Samad.

　　"Because you are a rare Englishman, Sapper Jones. I consider you my friend."Archie was not sure what he considered Samad, but he smiled gentry in recognition of the sentiment.

　　"You will have dinner with my wife and I in the year 1975. When we are big-bellied men sitting on our money-mountains. Somehow we will meet."Archie, dubious of foreign food, smiled weakly.

　　"We will know each other throughout our lives!"Archie laid Samad down, got himself a mattress and manoeuvred himself into a position for sleep.

　　"Goodnight, friend," said Samad, pure contentment in his voice.

　　In the morning, the circus came to town. Woken by shouts and whooping laughter, Samad struggled into uniform and wrapped one hand around his gun. He stepped into the sun-drenched courtyard to find Russian soldiers in their dun-coloured uniforms leapfrogging over each other, shooting tin cans off each other's heads and throwing knives at potatoes stuck on sticks, each potato sporting a short black twig moustache. With all the exhaustion of revelation, Samad collapsed on to the front steps, sighed, and sat with his hands on his knees, his face turned up towards the heat. A moment later Archie tripped out, trousers half-mast, waving his gun, looking for the enemy, and shot a frightened bullet in the air. The circus continued, without noticing. Samad pulled Archie wearily by the trouser leg and gestured for him to sit down.

　　"What's going on?" demanded Archie, watery-eyed.

　　"Nothing. Nothing absolutely is going on. In fact, it's gone off.""But these might be the men who '

　　"Look at the potatoes, Jones."Archie looked wildly about him. "What have potatoes got to do with it?""They're Hitler potatoes, my friend. They are vegetable dictators. Ex-dictators." He pulled one off its stick. "See the little moustaches? It's over, Jones. Someone has finished it for us."Archie took the potato in his hand.

　　The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miaft Iqbal "Like a bus, Jones. We have missed the bloody war."Archie shouted over to a lanky Russian in mid-spear of a Hitler potato. "Speak English? How long has it been over?""The fighting?" he laughed incredulously. "Two weeks, comrade! You will have to go to Japan if you want any more!""Like a bus," repeated Samad, shaking his head. A great fury was rising in him, bile blocking his throat. This war was to have been his opportunity. He was expected to come home covered in glory, and then to return to Delhi triumphant. When would he ever have another chance? There were going to be no more wars like this one, everybody knew that. The soldier who had spoken to Archie wandered over. He was dressed in the summer uniform of the Russians: the thin material, high-necked collar and oversized, floppy cap; he wore a belt around a substantial waist, the buckle of which caught the sun and shot a beam into Archie's eye. When the glare passed, Archie focused on a big, open face, a squint in the left eye, and a head of sandy hair that struck off in several directions. He was altogether a rather jolly apparition on a bright morning, and when he spoke it was in a fluent, American-accented English that lapped at your ears like surf.

　　"The war has been over for two weeks and you were not aware?""Our radio ... it wasn't.. ." Archie's sentence gave up on itself.

　　The soldier grinned widely and shook each man's hand vigorously. "Welcome to peace-time, gentlemen! And we thought the Russians were an ill-informed nation!" He laughed his big laugh again. Directing his question to Samad, he asked, "Now, where are the rest of you?""There is no rest of us, comrade. The rest of the men in our tank are dead, and there is no sign of our battalion.""You're not here for any purpose?""Er .. . no," said Archie, suddenly abashed.

　　"Purpose, comrade," said Samad, feeling quite sick to his stomach. "The war is over and so we find ourselves here quite without purpose." He smiled grimly and shook the Russian's hand with his good hand. Tm going in. Sun," he said, squinting.

　　"Hurts my little peepers. It was nice to have met you.""Yes, indeed," said the Russian, following Samad with his eyes until he had disappeared into the recesses of the church. Then he turned his attention to Archie.

　　"Strange guy.""Hmm," said Archie. "Why are you here?" he asked, taking a hand-rolled cigarette the Russian offered him. It turned out the Russian and the seven men with him were on their way to Poland, to liberate the work-camps one heard about sometimes in hushed tones. They had stopped here, west of Tokat, to catch themselves a Nazi.

　　"But there's no one here, mate," said Archie affably. "No one but me and the Indian and some old folk and children from the village. Everyone else is dead or fled.""Dead or fled .. . dead or fled," said the Russian, highly amused, turning a matchstick over and over between his finger and thumb. "Good phrase this .. . funny phrase. No, well, you see, I would have thought the same, but we have reliable information from your own secret service, in fact that there is a senior officer, at this very moment, hiding in that house. There." He pointed to the house on the horizon.

　　"The Doctor? Some little lads told us about him. I mean, he must be shitting himself with fear if you lot are after him," said Archie, by way of a compliment, 'but I'm sure they said he's just some sick bloke; they called him Dr. Sick. Oi: he ain't English, is he? Traitor or something?""Hmm? Oh no. No, no, no, no. Dr. Marc-Pierre Perret. A young Frenchman. A prodigy Very brilliant. He has worked in a scientific capacity for the Nazis since before the war. On the sterilization programme, and later the euthanasia policy. Internal German matters. He was one of the very loyal.""Blimey," said Archie, wishing he knew what it all meant. "Wotchyagunnadoo?""Catch him and take him to Poland, where he will be dealt with by the authorities.""Authorities," said Archie, still impressed but not really paying attention. "Blimey."Archie's attention span was always short, and he had become distracted by the big, amiable Russian's strange habit of looking in two directions at once.

　　"As the information we received was from your secret service and as you are the highest-ranking officer here Captain .. . Captain .. ."A glass eye. It was a glass eye with a muscle behind it that would not behave.

　　"I'm afraid I don't know your name or rank," said the Russian, looking at Archie with one eye and at some ivy creeping round the church door with the other.

　　"Who? Me? Jones," said Archie, following the eye's revolving path: tree, potato, Archie, potato.

　　"Well, Captain Jones, it would be an honour if you would lead the expedition up the hill.""Captain what? Blimey, no, you've got it arse-ways-up," said Archie, escaping the magnetic force of the eye, and refocusing on himself, dressed in Dickinson-Smith's shiny buttoned uniform.

　　"I'm not a bloody '

　　The Lieutenant and I would be pleased to take charge," broke in a voice behind him. "We've been out of the action for quite a while. It is about time we got back in the thick of it, as they say."Samad had stepped out on to the front steps silently as a shadow, in another of Dickinson-Smith's uniforms and with a cigarette hanging casually off his lower lip like a sophisticated sentence. He was always a good-looking boy, and dressed in the shiny buttons of authority this was only accentuated; in the sharp daylight, framed by the church door, he cut quite an awesome figure.

　　"What my friend meant," said Samad in his most charming Anglo-Indian lilt, 'is that he is not the bloody captain. I am the bloody captain. Captain Samad Iqbal.""Comrade Nikolai Nick Pesotsky."Samad and the Russian laughed together heartily, shook hands again. Samad lit a cigarette.

　　"He is my lieutenant. Archibald Jones. I must apologize if I behaved strangely earlier; the food's been disagreeing with me. Now: we'll set off tonight, after dark shall we? Lieutenant?" said Samad, looking at Archie with a private encoded intensity.

　　"Yes," blurted Archie.

　　"By the way, comrade," said Samad, striking a match off the wall and lighting up, "I hope you do not mind if I ask is that a glass eye? It is most realistic.""Yes! I purchased it in St. Petersburg. I was separated from my own in Berlin. It's a quite incredible likeness, don't you think?"The friendly Russian popped the eye out of its socket, and laid the slimy pearl in his palm for Samad and Archie to see. When the war started, thought Archie, all us boys were crowded around a fag-card of Grable's legs. Now the war's ended we're huddled round some poor bastard's eye.

　　Blimey.

　　For a moment the eye slid up and down each side of the Russian's hand, then came to a restful halt in the centre of his longish, creased life-line. It looked up at Lieutenant Archie and Captain Samad with an unblinking stare.

　　That evening Lieutenant Jones got his first taste of real war. In two army jeeps, Archie, the eight Russians, Gozan the cafe owner and Gozan's nephew were led by Samad on a mission up the hill to catch a Nazi. While the Russians swigged away at bottles of Sambucca until not a man among them could remember the first lines of their own national anthem, while Gozan sold roasted chicken pieces to the highest bidders, Samad stood atop the first jeep, high as a kite on his white dust, his arms flailing around, cutting the night into bits and pieces, screaming instructions that his battalion were too drunk to listen to and he himself was too far gone to understand.

　　Archie sat at the back of the second jeep, quiet, sober, frightened and in awe of his friend.

　　Archie had never had a hero: he was five when his father went out for a proverbial pack of fags and neglected to return, and, never being much of a reader, the many awful books written to provide young men with famous heroes had never crossed his path no swashbucklers, no one eyed pirates, no fearless rapscallions for Archie. But Samad, as he stood up there with his shiny officer buttons glistening in the moonlight like coins in a wishing-well, had struck the seventeen year-old Archie full square, an uppercut to the jaw that said: here is a man for whom no life-path is too steep. Here was a raving lunatic standing on a tank, here was a friend, here was a hero, in a form Archie had never expected. Three quarters of the way up, however, the ad hoc road the tanks had been following thinned unexpectedly, forcing the tank to brake suddenly and throwing the heroic Captain in a backward somersault over the tank, arse in the air.

　　"No one comes here for long, long time," said Gozan's nephew, munching on a chicken bone, philosophically. "This?" He looked at Samad (who had landed next to him) and pointed to the jeep they sat in. "No way."So Samad gathered his now paralytic battalion around him and began the march up the mountain in search of a war he could one day tell his grandchildren about, as his great-grandfather's exploits had been told to him. Their progress was hampered by large clods of earth, torn from parts of the hill by the reverberation of past bombs and left at intervals along the pathway. From many, the roots of trees shot up impotently and languished in the air; to get by, it was necessary for them to be hacked away with the bayonets of the Russian guns.

　　"Look like hell!" snorted Gozan's nephew, drunkenly scrambling through one such set of roots.

　　"Everything look like hell!""Pardon him. He feel strongly because he is young. But it is the truth. It was not how do you say not argument of ours, Lieutenant Jones," said Gozan, who had been bribed two pairs of boots to keep quiet about his friends' sudden rise in rank. "What do we have to do with all this?" He wiped a tear, half inebriated, half overcome with emotion. "What we have to do with? We peaceful people.

　　We don't want be in war! This hill once beautiful. Flowers, birds, they were singing, you understand? We are from the East. What have the battles of the West to do with us?"Instinctively, Archie turned to Samad, expecting one of his speeches; but before Gozan had even finished, Samad had suddenly picked up his pace, and within a minute was running, pushing ahead of the intoxicated Russians, who were flailing about with their bayonets. Such was his speed that he was soon out of sight, turning a blind corner and disappearing into the swallowing night.

　　Archie dithered for a few minutes, but then loosened himself from Gozan's nephew's merciless grip (he was just embarking upon the tale of a Cuban prostitute he had met in Amsterdam) and began to run to where he had last seen the flicker of a silver button, another one of the sharp turnings that the mountain path took whenever it liked.

　　"Captain Ick-Ball! Wait, Captain Ick-Ball!"He ran on, repeating the phrase, waving his torch, which did nothing but light up the undergrowth in increasingly bizarre anthropomorphisms; here a man, here a woman on her knees, here three dogs howling at the moon. He spent some time like this, stumbling about in the darkness.

　　"Put your light on! Captain Ick-Ball! Captain Ick-Ball!"No answer.

　　no"Captain Ick-Ball!""Why do you call me that," said a voice, close, on his right, 'when you know I am no such thing?""Ick-Ball?" and as he asked the question, Archie's flash stumbled upon him, sitting on a boulder, head in hands.

　　"Why1 mean, you are not really so much of an idiot, are you you do know, I presume you know that I am in fact a private of His Majesty's Army?""Course. We have to keep it up, though, don't we? Our cover, and that.""Our cover? Boy." Samad chuckled to himself in a way that struck Archie as sinister, and when he lifted his head his eyes were both bloodshot and on the brink of tears. "What do you think this is?

　　Are we playing silly-buggers?

　　"No, I... are you all right, Sam? You look out of sorts."Samad was dimly aware that he looked out of sorts. Earlier that evening he had put a tiny line of the white stuff in the cup of each eyelid. The morphine had sharpened his mind to a knife edge and cut it open. It had been a luscious, eloquent high while it lasted, but then the thoughts thusreleased had been left to wallow in a pool of alcohol and had landed Samad in a malevolent trough.

　　He saw his reflection this evening, and it was ugly. He saw where he was at the farewell party for the end of Europe and he longed for the East. He looked down at his useless hand with its five useless appendages;at his skin, burnt to a chocolate-brown by the sun; he saw into his brain, made stupid by stupid conversation and the dull stimuli of death, and longed for the man he once was: erudite, handsome, light-skinned Samad Miah; so precious his mother kept him in from the sun's rays, sent him to the best tutors and covered him in linseed oil twice a day.

　　"Sam? Sam? You don't look right, Sam. Please, they'll be here in a minute .. . Sam?"Self-hatred makes a man turn on the first person he sees. But in it was particularly aggravating to Samad that this should be Archie, who looked down at him with a gentle concern, with a mix of fear and anger all mingled up in that shapeless face so ill-equipped to express emotion.

　　"Don't call me Sam," he growled, in a voice Archie did not recognize, Tm not one of your English matey-boys. My name is Samad Miah Iqbal. Not Sam. Not Sammy. And not God forbid Samuel. It is Samad."Archie looked crestfallen.

　　"Well, anyway," said Samad, suddenly officious and wishing to avoid an emotional scene, "I am glad you are here because I wanted to tell you that I am the worse for wear, Lieutenant Jones. I am, as you say, out of sorts. I am very much the worse for wear."He stood, but then stumbled on to his boulder once more.

　　"Get up," hissed Archie between his teeth. "Get up. What's the matter with you?""It's true, I am very much the worse for the wearing. But I have been thinking," said Samad, taking his gun in his good hand.

　　"Put that away.""I have been thinking that I am buggered, Lieutenant Jones. I see no future. I realize this may come as a surprise to you my upper lip, I'm afraid is not of the required stiffness but the fact remains. I see only '

　　"Put that away.""Blackness. I'm a cripple, Jones." The gun did a merry dance in his good hand as he swung himself from side to side. "And my faith is crippled, do you understand? I'm fit for nothing now, not even Allah, who is all powerful in his mercy. What am I going to do, after this war is over, this war that is already over what am I going to do? Go back to Bengal? Or to Delhi? Who would have such an Englishman there? To England? Who would have such an Indian? They promise us independence in exchange for the men we were. But it is a devilish deal. What should I do?

　　The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samoa1 Mtak Iqbal Stay here? Go elsewhere? What laboratory needs one-handed men? What am I suited for?""Look, Sam .. . you're making a fool of yourself.""Really? And is that how it is to be, friend?" asked Samad, standing, tripping over a stone and colliding back into Archie. "In one afternoon I promote you from Private Shitbag to lieutenant of the British army and this is my thanks? Where are you in my hour of need? Gozan!" he shouted to the fat cafe owner, who was struggling round the bend, at the very back, sweating profusely.

　　"Gozan my fellow Muslim in Allah's name, is this right?""Shut up," snapped Archie. "Do you want everyone to hear you? Put it down."Samad's gun arm shot out of the darkness and wrapped itself around Archie's neck, so the gun and both their heads were pressed together in an odious group hug.

　　"What am I good for, Jones? If I were to pull this trigger, what will I leave behind? An Indian, a turncoat English Indian with a limp wrist like a faggot and no medals that they can ship home with me." He let go of Archie and grabbed his own collar instead.

　　"Have some of these, for God's sake," said Archie, taking three from his lapel and throwing them at him. "I've got loads.""And what about that little matter? Do you realize we're deserters? Effectively deserters? Step back a minute, my friend, and look at us. Our captain is dead. We are dressed in his uniforms, taking control of officers, men of higher rank than ourselves, and how? By deceit. Doesn't that make us deserters?""The war was over! I mean, we made an effort to contact the rest.""Did we? Archie, my friend, did we? Really? Or did we sit around on our arses like deserters, hiding in a church while the world was falling apart around our ears, while men were dying in the fields?"They tussled a little as Archie tried to get the gun from him, Samad lashing out at him with not inconsiderable strength. In the distance, Archie could see the rest of their motley crew turning the corner, a great grey mass in the twilight, pitching from side to side, singing "Lydia the Tattooed Lady'.

　　"Look, keep your voice down. And calm down," said Archie, releasing him.

　　"We're impostors; turncoats in other people's coats. Did we do our duty, Archibald? Did we? In all honesty? I have dragged you down with me, Archie, and for that I am sorry. The truth is, this was my fate. This was all written for me long ago."O Lydia O Lydia O have you met Lydia O Lydia the Taaaatooooed Lady!

　　Samad put the pistol absent-mindedly in his mouth and cocked the trigger.

　　"Ick-Ball, listen to me," said Archie. "When we were in that tank with the Captain, with Roy and the rest."O Lydia the Queen of tattoos! On her back is the battle of Waterloo.. .

　　"You were always going on about being a hero and all that like your great-uncle whatsisname."Beside it the wreck of the Hesperus too ... Samad took the gun out of his mouth.

　　"Pande," he said. "Great-grandfather," and put the gun back in.

　　"And here it is a chance it's staring you in the face. You didn't want to miss the bus and we're not going to, not if we do this properly. So don't be such a silly fucker about it."And proudly above waves the red, white and bloooo, You can learn a lot from Lydia!

　　"Comrade! What in God's name."Without them noticing, the friendly Russian had ambled up behind them and was looking in horror at Samad, sucking his gun like a lollipop.

　　"Cleaning it," stuttered Samad, dearly shaken, removing the gun from his mouth.

　　That's how they do it," Archie explained, 'in Bengal."The war that twelve men expected to find in the grand old house on the hill, the war that Samad wanted pickled in ajar to hand to his grandchildren as a souvenir of his youth, was not there. Dr. Sick was as good as his name, sitting in an armchair in front of a wood-burning fire. Sick. Huddled in a rug. Pale. Very thin. In no uniform, just an open-neck white shirt and some dark coloured trousers. He was a young man too, not over twenty-five, and he did not flinch or make any protest when they all burst in, guns at the ready. It was as if they had just dropped in on a pleasant French farmhouse, making the faux pas of coming without invitation and bringing guns to the dinner table.

　　The room was lit entirely by gas lamps in their tiny lady-shaped casings, and the light danced up the wall, illuminating a set of eight paintings that showed a continuous scene of Bulgarian countryside. In the fifth one Samad recognized his church, a blip of sandy paint on the horizon. The paintings were placed at intervals and wrapped round the room in a panoramic. Untrained and in a mawkish attempt at the modern style, a ninth sat a little too close to the fireplace on an easel, the paint still wet. Twelve guns were pointed at the artist. And when the Artist-Doctor turned to face them, he had what looked like blood-tinged tears rolling down his face.

　　Samad stepped forward. He had had a gun in his mouth and was emboldened by it. He had eaten an absurd amount of morphine, fallen through the hole morphine creates, and survived. You are never stronger, thought Samad as he approached the Doctor, than when you land on the other side of despair.

　　"Are you Dr. Ferret?" he demanded, making the Frenchman wince at the anglicized pronunciation, sending more bloody tears down his cheeks. Samad kept his gun pointed at him.

　　"Yes, I am he.""What is that? That in your eyes?" asked Samad.

　　"I have diabetic retinopathy, monsieur.""What?" asked Samad, still pointing the gun, determined not to undermine his moment of glory with an unheroic medical debate.

　　"It means that when I do not receive insulin, I excrete blood, my friend. Through my eyes. It makes my hobby," he gestured at the paintings that surrounded him, 'not a little difficult. There were to be ten. A i8o-degree view. But it seems you have come to disturb me." He sighed and stood up. "So. Are you going to kill me, my friend?""I'm not your friend.""No, I do not suppose that you are. But is it your intention to kill me? Pardon me if I say you do not look old enough to squash flies." He looked at Samad's uniform. "Mon Dieu, you are very young to have got so far in life, Captain." Samad shifted uncomfortably, catching Archie's look of panic in the corner of his vision. Samad placed his feet a little further apart and stood firm.

　　"I'm sorry if I seem tiresome on this point but ... is it your intention, then, to kill me?"Samad's arm stayed perfectly still, the gun unmoving. He could kill him, he could kill him in cold blood. Samad did not need the cover of darkness or the excuse of war. He could kill him and they both knew it. The Russian, seeing the look in the Indian's eye, stepped forward. "Pardon me, Captain."Samad remained silent, facing the Doctor, so the Russian stepped forward. "We do not have intentions in this matter," said the Russian, addressing Dr. Sick. "We have orders to bring you to Poland.""And there, will I be killed?""That will be for the proper authorities to decide The Doctor cocked his head at an angle and narrowed his eyes. "It is just ... it is just a thing a man likes to be told. It is curiously significant to a man to be told. It is only polite, at the very least. To be told whether he shall die or whether he shall be spared.""That will be for the proper authorities to decide," repeated the Russian.

　　Samad walked behind the Doctor and stuck the gun into the back of his head. "Walk," he said.

　　"For the proper authorities to decide .. . Isn't peacetime civilized?" remarked Dr. Sick, as a group of twelve men, all pointing guns at his head, led him out of the house.

　　Later that night, at the bottom of the hill, the battalion left Dr. Sick handcuffed to th